The Singular Adventures Of My Sketchbook

I love teaching but after eight years of it, I'm getting burnt out and I want to take a little break this year and focus on my comics and craft. I've been teaching an Inking class and in the beginning of the semester we focused exclusively on line and stroke...ONLY. All the while, referring to the classic pen and ink masters- Howard Pyle, Thomas Nast, Daniel Vierge, Edwin Austin Abbey, Joseph Clement Coll, Charles Dana Gibson, etc. Reexamining these artists has greatly influenced my own work. Proceeding on, we explored other rendering techniques.

Here's some quick stuff I ripped from my "sketchbook" that I used to try out new materials and papers and inks. These aren't that great. These samples look exactly like the art I made as an undergrad at MCAD!


Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran
tech pen, brush,Wash with China Ink, old marker


I popped open an old Koh-I-Noor technical pen with year-old ink and it still worked. I did all the outlining in thin techpen to contrast the heavy blacks. I used the palm of my hand to spot some of the blacks.



Lilly Allen
Ink, collage



I've been doing all the one-layer-washes in Non-waterproof ink lately but I tried to do the lines in grayed-out Higgins Drawing Ink. I actually collaged the dress pattern on instead of Photoshop which I think looks better. I miss real collage. I'm getting more impatient with art-making which is not good. I used to spend 2 weeks doing a piece, now I only want to spend 2 hours.




Tricky
Tech pen, India Ink, Non waterproof, China Ink, chalk, acrylic, collage



This is a really unfinished demo. I used it just to experiment different layered media. This is why I like handmade over digital even though digital gets all the love these days. I bought my Adobe CS3 with my teacher discount but I'm going to wait a few months to install it so I can make friends with Photoshop 7 for just little bit longer. I'm scared of progress.